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Domination, Competition and Exploitation

An Introduction to the Socialization of Capital (and How It Fails Us)

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Capital shows itself more and more to be a social
power, with the capitalist as its functionary – a power that no longer stands
in any possible kind of relationship to what the work of one particular
individual can create, but an alienated social power which has gained an
autonomous position and confronts society as a thing, and as the power that the
capitalist has through this thing.[1]–Karl Marx

Capital is
not an abstract category, it is a semiotic operator at the service of specific social formations. Its
function is to record, balance, regulate and overcode the power formations
inherent to developed industrial societies, power relations and the fluxes that
make up the planet’s overall economic powers.[2]–Félix Guattari

In his book on Marx –
slyly subtitled Adventures and Misadventures of a Critique – Daniel
Bensaïd writes about Marxism as a critical theory rather than an ideological
doctrine. It is a theory of struggle and transformation (or revolution, if you
will), granted, but not a prophesy, scientific orthodoxy, or even sociology.
Bensaïd instead tries to posit a postmodern Marx, a set of critical tools that
can be employed to analyze and criticize contemporary forms of capital. This
means, then, that Marxist terms must be seen as open to interpretation and use
(value), but also as taking part in a certain history – thus the adventures and
misadventures. Seen in this light, the fall of the so-called communist regimes
of the Soviet Bloc is not to be viewed as the end of the critical theory of
Marx, but rather as a (new) beginning hereof, freed from hardened orthodoxy and
the burden of Stalinism. According to
Bensaïd, Marx’s project consists of three fundamental critiques: that of
historical reason, economic reason and scientific positivism. Three critiques,
which complement each other in turn, and that are

directly relevant to current questions about the end
of history and the representation of time; about the relationship between class
struggle and other types of conflict; about the destinies of hard sciences
tormented by the uncertainties of the narrative sciences.[3]

It is in this line that
the current publication is to be read: as an effort to engage in a critique of
dominant narratives and assumptions. A critique that takes as its point of
departure the notion of capital as its central idea, and indeed as a
centralizing machinery in the current world system. It is an effort to state
that if there is indeed such a thing as an empire, which is highly debatable, the advent of this empire is
driven by a specific mechanism, a specific organizing and socializing
principle: capital. As such, we have returned, albeit by way of a différance,
to the central and key notion of capital
itself as the basis for our enquiry. But what exactly is capital?[4]
As capital(ism) becomes increasingly essentialized and naturalized, it is
tempting to see capital as a universal, or at least universalizing norm: To
state that we all live under the conditions of capital, although that sounds both too obvious and too obtuse.
Also, it seems antithetical to the theory of Capital to see it as
universal, since the theory does not try to
establish a universal history or theory thereof, but rather a theory of
transformation, of possible change, counter-narratives and new hegemonies.
Capital is, rather, what Cornelius Castoriadis would call an imaginary order,
which does not mean that it does not have real effects, quite the contrary. It
acts as a universalizing principle of measuring and (ac)counting, but it can,
crucially, also be countered by other
imaginaries. Capital is, then, a specific situation with specific histories
and contingencies, but also with undeveloped potentialities, that can be
directed towards its expansion as well as towards its demise.

The essays and projects
presented in this book are all engaging in such critiques – of historical and
economic determinism, and of scientific positivism – in establishing and
challenging such dominant imaginaries. They try to analyze and visualize the
contemporary conditions of capital, arguably very different from the conditions
present when Marx wrote his theory of Capital. There is the evident change from
industrialism to post-industrialism, although these modes of production are as
much simultaneous as chronological, and as much geographical as they are
temporal (as is the shift between Fordist and post-Fordist production).[5]
The undeniable rise of immaterial labor does not only indicate a new
relationship to the production of (surplus) value in the ways in which capital
circulates through the body of the worker, but also in the ways that
commodities manifest this value. In the case of immaterial labor, we should
perhaps talk of capital not only going through the body as in material labor,
but also through the very soul (!) of the worker, while in the case of the
commodity we can speak of a dematerialization of value: in either case we are
speaking of an almost ghost-like presence. This then also requires new
understandings of technologies, so central to the knowledge economy of
post-Fordism. In writing about technology, Marx famously described the
difference between a tool and a machine, with the former being an extension of
the body and the latter an exploitation of the body. If this distinction is to
be upheld, we will then need to discern between mental and bodily machines (and
tools), and see how technical innovation in this area influences production in
other sectors. According to Marx,
machines alter the relations to nature (ecology), mental relations (the way we
think, imagination), social relations (the way we act) as well as the reproduction of human life, and as such the
machine, with its productivity, autonomization, exchangeability and
measuring devices, is an apt image of capital itself. Here we can maintain a
focus on the processes of capitalization and its effects, economically as well
as subjectively. It is thus not merely the economic aspects of capital that
must be followed, but also capitalization as a matrix for subjectivity and
interpersonal, even intimate, relations.

The
logic of capital itself, rather than a broad concept of capitalism as an
economic system, is of course often overlooked, forgotten, hidden or
taken for granted as naturalized in the current language game of politics with
its focus on democracy, liberty and human rights. Current debates seem to
indicate that there is no alternative to the market, to capital. We know this
from the media, academia and social situations. A couple of examples: a
relative of mine recently said that he believed in capitalism as the only
system, since communism and socialism had always failed; a former colleague of
mine once stated that she would like to believe in socialism, but that she was
afraid it was against human nature. But one could argue whether capitalism
really is so successful, and if so, on what grounds? And is human existence not
based as much on collaboration as on the survival of the fittest? In any case,
these examples show how certain notions have become naturalized and
essentialized, how deeply they have become
internalized in the way we think, talk and feel. However, such ideas
which regard capitalism as the only game in town can be questioned on a number
of levels, since they conflate the market with capital – there were market
economies before capitalism, of course – making this a highly dubious
historical argument, that is not only essentialist, but that effectively
presupposes an end to history, a possible equilibrium beyond conflict and
indeed politics. But does our world really appear
so stable and endless? Are there not conflicts between our daily lives and global capital? Are we not affected and
placed in various struggles, from the upkeep of bare life to the
attempts to live up to role models from advertising and popular culture? Indeed battle lines seem to exist not only between factors
seen as external to capitalist/liberal democratic society, such as the
increasing gap between rich and poor countries and the global ecological
problems due to the endless expansion and industrialization of capital, unable
to stop itself, but also internally, between who belongs to a workforce and who
doesn’t along with the increasing gap between
images of desirability – independence, upward mobility, physical beauty,
functioning family, etc. – and the ability to actually live them, both
financially and psychologically.

The reproductive family,
sexuality and childrearing, as well as notions of working as living, as
identitarian, are among the battle lines being drawn by the commodification of
everything, of all aspects of human existence from bare life itself to the
(apparent) multiple choices of life style. In Numéro Deux, a seminal
film by Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Mieville from 1975 (which is exactly the
time of the shift from Fordist to post-Fordist production in Western Europe),
there is a crucial line which goes, “there was a landscape, and we put a
factory in it.” The film describes the difficulties of living under
capitalistic conditions, specifically the impossibility of maintaining a
bourgeois nuclear family under industrial living conditions, and shows the
family as a factory. The film therefore concludes with the altered line: “There
was a factory, and we built a landscape around it.” It is the factory then, the
machine of capital itself that produces our environment, not vice versa. We
have naturalized a specific cultural construction, and it is one of the
purposes of our project to de-naturalize our present: To show how capital fails
us.

In this way capital(ism)
does seem universal as a common denominator which is, naturally, also part of
its effect as being the great calculator; measuring, translating and pricing
everything and everyone. Capital acts doubly, on the one hand it is an
equalizer: everything becomes the same in the sense that it can be exchanged,
but on the other hand, everything becomes different through the exchange,
through its exchange value, as it were. This is capital’s universalist claim,
its universalizing move. However universal capitalism acts or seems though, the
universal is essentially empty or void, only to be filled with a particular
content making claims for the universal, such as is the case with capitalism
now.[6] So in order to understand how capital works
as universalizing, it is crucial to study its particularities, its local as
well as global workings and effects. Hence the focus on location, here
particularized by double, but connected sites or economic, territorial
organizations: the (post)welfare state (as exemplified by Norway) and the
post-communist country (as exemplified by Estonia), the two places where the
exhibitionary interventions took place. But our exploration of the notion of
capital must proceed along dual lines: on the one hand the aforementioned locationality,
and on the other, subjectivity – how capitalism affects our daily lives,
our very structure of feelings and perceptions: the machine is both mental and
bodily. We shall focus on the current
moment in history, with its structural changes, and, arguably, crisis,
within global capital, and look at the two specific locations as models, as
machinery within the production and proliferation of capital. Partly, the
Western European model of the welfare state is undergoing a massive structural
change, if not deconstruction. This can also be seen in the refined variation
of the welfare state, the Nordic social democratic model of redistribution and
equilibrium; a compromise between liberalism and socialism, but also a temporal
territorial alliance between capital and labor that is now historical. In other
words, capital must be localized and historicized, as suggested by Immanuel
Wallerstein with his notion of ‘historical capitalism’. This is also the case
on the margins of the new Europe, with the rapid and massive deregulation of
the post-communist countries, where the former state capitalism (as a mode of
production as much as an ‘official’ ideological state formation: “communism
equals socialism plus electricity”[7])
is being transformed into a neoliberal, transnational market system. But how do
these formations, or variations, affect each other? What are the routes between
them and are they tending towards merger or secession? As borders get reconfigured,
new battle lines are drawn around notions of territory and alliances, no longer
maintained between exploited and exploiters, but rather among the exploited
themselves: those with work and those without, those with papers and those
without. It’s the effects of global capitalism, rather than its principle, that
such a historical belief in the nation-state attests to; that the nation-state
will somehow save us from globalism (as the key word replacing capitalism).
Unfortunately, trade unions and left-wing parties in most of the former welfare
states subscribe to this historical model of nation and production, that was
part and parcel of the rise of capitalism, and has since been left behind by
capital in its later, current stages: When will it be left behind by the
(historical) left?

The project is, then, to
discuss these specific models of capital and (cultural) production and how we
can visualize the current changes. These essays and projects take their point
of departure in these specific models of (re)production and (re)distribution,
and look at how production is changing in the Western countries, mainly from
industrial production to immaterial labor, and in the East from state
capitalism to a deregulated (post)industrialism with a new commodification and
codification of the labor force, and thus of all social as well as economic
relations. What are ‘new’ economies, and what kinds of technologies of the self
are they producing, and indeed, enforcing? Thus, in these pages you will find efforts to review the situation, asking what
is to be done in this predicament of expansive global capitalism,
corporatization of culture, the specularization
of politics, and the marginalization, even criminalization, of the critical
left. Discussions range from the spectral form of value, (self)-precarization,
deregulation and the privatization of the welfare state to the development of alternative economies and the
establishment of various modes of critique and resistance, cartography and
historiography, inclination and inquiry, and the politicization of subject
positions.

We shall aim to understand
the notion of capital, then, as an economic tool, as a measure of exchange and
surplus, and as something at once regulated
and regulating (by both State and market), as well as a producer
of subjectivity (a.k.a. the commodification of everything), but also as a power
tool, a force-relation. In an essay called ‘Capital as the Integral of
Power Relations’, the late Felix Guattari provocatively states that capital is primarily about power and only
secondarily about profit (and thus, perhaps, touches upon notions of
biopower and governmentality). Guattari’s text not only points to the changes
from the national organization to global capitalism, but also modifies Marx’s
theories in turn, especially in a reconfiguration of the composition of value.
Secondly, Guattari focuses on this change in terms of a ‘semiotization’ of
capital. This notion is crucial for two reasons: firstly in terms of
articulation, since the grander motivation behind Capital (It Fails Us Now),
is to ask how to go about articulating a contemporary description of capital,
which may or may not follow some of the routes pointed out by Guattari and how
to articulate and imagine a non-capitalistic subjectivity. Guattari obviously
takes his cue from the theories of Lacan here, turning his famous idea of the
subconscious being structured like a language onto the logic of capital, its
expansions and subjectivizations, and claiming that capital is (like) a
language. Accounting, measuring and the stock exchange are all linguistic
effects, as is the automatization and machinic assemblage of the production and
labor process. This notion of semiotization is also a way of describing labor
becoming immaterial (and the subsequent dematerialization of value):

Automatized and computerized production no longer
draws its consistency from basic human factors, but from a machinic phylum
which traverses, bypasses, disperses, miniaturizes, and co-opts all human
activities.[8]

As
in the machinic understanding of capital in Marx, technical innovation, including new technologies, is more of a
disciplining and alienation of the body and the subject than an aid to it. In
other words, the dematerialization of labor and its computerized techniques, as
well as its inherent reorganization of leisure and labor time, is not to be
considered an emancipation of the working subject and its creativity, but
rather as the total co-optation hereof by the machinery of capital.

Guattari’s linguistic turn
brings about metaphors of grammar and structure, obviously, but perhaps also
notions of counter-narrative, incoherent speech, gibberish, lying and détournement.
And maybe even silence, muting. That is, in the usage of language also lies
resistance.[9] Perhaps this was what Michel Foucault was
aiming at in his otherwise strangely ambivalent and non-committal preface to
another of Guattari’s works, Anti-Oedipus (co-written with Gilles
Deleuze). Foucault famously called the book
an introduction and even manual to the “Nonfascist Life.”[10]
What Foucault was aiming at, was not the historical political formation of fascism, but rather the contemporaneous
fascism in our heads. This was something that should be achieved via
everyday practice; an ethics and politics of the everyday, but we shall also
try to imagine models for a post- or anti-commodified subject position. If
Michel Foucault could write about the ‘nonfascist life’, can we imagine the
non-capitalist subject? And what will this
entail in terms of economic and social relations living within capitalism?
If capital, as was the case with fascism, is in our heads, that is as processes
of subjectivization and subjugation, something possessing our very souls, we
should perhaps speak more of exorcism than exodus as a political strategy...

A slightly different way
of thinking capital as a technology, now that desiring-machines (as posited by
Guattari) have to a large extent been smoothly incorporated into global
capital, has recently been supplied by Ray Brassier. Writing on Alain Badiou’s
mathematical ontology, Brassier sees capital as nothing more and nothing less
than a huge (accounting) machine, what he calls “... an automated axiomatic
system.”[11] Brassier
sees capital as a machine that can think, fuelled by the very instability and
randomness of numbers, rather than countered by it the way Deleuze and Guattari
hoped:

Far from being threatened by its ‘contradiction’,
capitalism thrives on them. It is an open system, an aleatory axiomatic,
continually redefining its own structural boundaries, perpetually living off
its own impossible limit.[12]

It is thus not a
determinate, but rather an indeterminate, logic: capital is both the real and
the void, and in this sense even the theory that is ‘Capital’ fails us. Could
this then also indicate that refusing to be counted – to stand up and be
counted, as it were – is a possible resistance strategy? This would also mean
that the right to work should be changed to the right not to work, not to be
counted, stamped, filed, briefed and indexed; that
we begin to detach from the notion of work – material or immaterial – as
the foundation for (political) identity, and begin to lead truly unproductive
lives.

[4] Marx never actually used the
term capitalism, but only capital, understood as an economic and social
relation of domination, competition and exploitation, rather than as an
ideology proper.

[5] Here it might be useful to refer
to Paolo Virno’s definition of post-Fordism not as a general shift from
material to immaterial labor, but rather as a reorganization of all parts of
the production and labor process, that is, as a shift in the relation between
the worker and work: “By post-Fordism, I mean instead a set of characteristics
that are related to the entire contemporary
workforce, including fruit pickers and the poorest of immigrants. Here are some
of them: the ability to react in a timely manner to the continual innovations
in techniques and organizatorial models, a remarkable ‘opportunism’ in
negotiating among the different possibilities offered by the job market,
familiarity with what is possible and unforseeable, that minimal
entrepreneurial attitude that makes it possible to decide what is the ‘right
thing’ to do within a nonlinear productive fluctuation, a certain familiarity
with the web of communications and information. As one can see, these are
generically human gifts, not the result of ‘specialization’. What I hold true
is that post-Fordism mobilizes all the faculties that characterize our species:
language, abstract thinking, disposition toward learning, plasticity, the habit
of not having solid habits.” Interview with Paolo Virno by Branden W. Joseph in
Grey Room 21, Fall 2005, 29.

[6] I am here referring to Ernesto
Laclau’s work on the category of the universal within political representation
and identification. See, for instance, ‘Universalism, Particularism and the
Question of Identity’ in Ernesto Laclau, Emancipations, London: Verso, 1996,
20-35, as well as his dialogue with Judith Butler and Slavoj Zizek in Judith
Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Zizek, Contingency, Hegemony,
Universalism, London: Verso, 2000.

[7] Commonly attributed to V.I.
Lenin, this much quoted phrase is apparently incorrect. The proper quote should
read: “Communism is the Power of Soviets plus the electrification of the whole
country!” which is slightly more ambiguous and even sinister... I thank Dmitry
Vilensky for bringing this to my attention.

[9] This all begs the
question, is language the only game in town? And what is the relation between
language games and capital as the integral of power relations? And is language
then the site for revolutions rather than the body as Guattari suggests (and as
Foucault perhaps suggested in his late works, i.e. ‘History of Sexuality’)? Is
it in the language that we use, as in when we are interpellated by
juridico-economic language from state institutions, but also when we respond
and react in it? (Not only to these very institutions, but in everyday language.
It has, recently, struck how exactly a juridico-economic language is employed
by individuals at times of breakdown in, say, friendships, where a sudden turn
to such a language capitalizes the relation somehow.) Will the non-capitalistic
subjectivity then be achieved through a language of desire, through something
non-codifiable? And, given the commodification of everything, how to deal with
the problem of co-optation and the state-form as giving and removing rights (to
articulation and participation)?

[10] Michel Foucault, ‘Preface to Anti-Oedipus’ (1976), reprinted in
Power, The Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954-1984, Volume 3, New York:
The New Press, 2000, 106-110.